Bend for Home, The Page 24

  It’s too warm, says Maisie.

  First it’s too cold, then it’s too warm, I say.

  That’s right, replies Maisie, I’m a nuisance.

  No, you’re not.

  Yes I am.

  She turns to the box.

  It’s bad enough being an astronaut, she says. But then there’s these climbers that get caught in the snow. There’s avalanches. And down they go, it’s terrible.

  She lifts a hand and curls it. My mother watches her.

  You should be in your bed, mother snarls.

  What!

  Give her a drink in her room, my mother says.

  It’s already there.

  What’s she saying? asks Maisie.

  She wants you to have a drink.

  Maisie looks at me. She scrutinizes my shoes, my trousers, my face. Shifts her glasses a fraction and continues this unabashed survey. A long time goes by.

  Didn’t you go to the nuns in the Holy Clares?

  I did, I say.

  And then the De La Salle Brothers slapped you. You got beaten up. They nearly killed you.

  Put a drink in her room, says mother. I’m not able.

  The two drinks are in her room.

  Are you sure?

  Of course I’m sure.

  Who put them there?

  Me.

  Oh. Did he? she asks Maisie.

  Nod, I say to Maisie.

  Nod to what?

  Nod to Mother.

  I’m turning into Santa Claus, she says.

  She nods dementedly.

  My mother points at her and laughs.

  That Santa, I say, is above in the loft.

  And then, you got thrown out of college, added Maisie, for going out to see the Bachelors. The Bachelors no less. And what about that five pounds you got from the man in Dublin. She gives me a scathing look. Did you pass it on?

  I did.

  Good.

  I get up and give Maisie another brandy and ginger ale.

  All donations, she says, are gratefully received. We’ll be in the boneyard long enough.

  Your drinks are in your own room, shouts my mother and she shakes her fist at Maisie.

  What?

  She should be in bed, Mother says to me.

  Here we are back at the hurt centre of some responsibility. When she was fit to get about the house my mother would have had her sister in bed at this juncture. Night fell in the house at a whim.

  Are those drinks in the room for her? Winnie asks, and leans over and nips me.

  Yes.

  See that they are, and she moves the black beads through her crimson-varnished fingers.

  I pour myself a brandy.

  Give yourself another one, says Maisie, you need it. Again she begins her scrutiny of me. And Frankie Brady died.

  He did.

  He was a laugh.

  He was.

  Yes, the poor fellow.

  Son, interrupts the mother.

  My mother wears black stockings to just below her knee.

  Son.

  What?

  Nothing.

  She reminds me of Charlie Chang, says Maisie.

  Who was he?

  He was before your time. You see Charlie Chang knew all his sons as numbers. There was son, number such-and-such. You had son number one, and you had son number six. And so on. Charlie was Chinese, of course. And then there was the time that Val O’Neill, your Uncle Val, Valentine, no less, or Pop O’Neill as the lads called him, took us to the Chinese. Val was a scream. What’s under that mound of grease? he hissed. Is there a cat missing in the vicinity? I could have died.

  Go to bed, shouts Winnie. The two drinks are outside.

  What’s she saying now? asks Maisie, laughing.

  At my time of life, my mother says, I’m not able, and she reaches a hand to her knee.

  When you were shopping in Cootehill, says Maisie, we couldn’t restrain her. You’d have to use force. Dermot has left us, she started with. Dermot is in town, Eileen told her. He’s gone, she’d shout. He’s not, said Eileen, he’s in town. She’d wait then start again.

  Eventually I pour the two offending drinks and bring them out to Maisie’s room. When I’m there I hear Winnie screaming Bed! Bed! Bed!

  It’s too early, I tell you! shouts Maisie.

  My mother yammers.

  I told you it’s too early.

  Bed!

  God above!

  Bed, I said!

  Stop it Winnie!

  Yayaya!

  The stroke my mother had has left her tongue a temper which refuses articulation. Ya-ya-ya-ya-yama! When I return to the sitting room Mother is on her feet in the middle of the floor.

  If she falls, screams Maisie, I can’t help her up.

  Mother goes back to her armchair and glares at Maisie. The sisters are estranged. There they are, the work of who makes us, variables, fraught, laughing, impatient, disturbed.

  The sisters’ silence is unbecoming as these wild science-fiction beasts go large-pawed and cumbersome into battle with huge, jungle roars.

  Release the dragon, says Laurence Olivier, in the film.

  *

  Mother turns to me.

  I fell on the fender, she says quietly. It was dark. That’s what happened. She touches the white cap on her scalp. But now I’m fine.

  The time she fell on the fender she was sixteen. But the two blows to her head – the fender and the radiator – have become mixed up. One mind gone off, the other mind in. On the box Pegasus flies over the cliffs to the rescue. There is a happy ending. We sit before these metaphorical beasts like figures in a surreal soap.

  But surrealism is a conscious obliteration of unaesthetic effects. Someone is in control.

  There is no censor in my mother’s mind. No artist refining an illusion. What’s happening comes through unabridged. The hard slog is crude. The repetition of commands surfaces out of a prior world of habit. They once had meaning and that’s what makes her desperate. The orders from the diseased subconscious veer from the pitiful to the dignified, while she peels frantically at a button on her blouse that she can’t undo.

  She proffers her wrist. I lead her through the house. We go to the door and stand there a moment looking out on the quiet estate. The bin, she says. Then back through the house. She looks into Maisie’s room, peers into my room and then we arrive at last by her bedside.

  Glasses, she says.

  I take off her glasses and put them on the sideboard.

  Earrings, she says, touching an ear.

  I slip off her shoes. I take off her jumper and skirt. I pull the nightdress over her head. All the time she looks at me. She feels her cap. I pull the sheet to her chin. She closes her eyes.

  It’s no good any longer, she says.

  Of course it is.

  No, she says, the mind is going.

  *

  Before sleep that night I remember a moment in time – myself, nineteen, maybe twenty, walking along in a blue trench coat, under trees, in the rain. I’m going somewhere. I try to imagine where I was going to but can’t. No matter. I have great expectations. In the dark the leaves are glistening. I’m happy it seems.

  I listen intently for any sound from Mother’s room. Nothing.

  After a while I hear Maisie.

  What’s to become of me? she says to herself and the wooden top of the po bangs shut.

  Near dawn the door to my bedroom opens a fraction. A hand reaches in, the light comes on. My mother is standing there in her Sunday best with the red hat low over her eyes and the handbag on her arm.

  Chapter 30

  In a terrible sleep filled with slugs which are turning into black cats I try to wake and go out to see if the mother is all right. I struggle to reach consciousness, but can’t. It’s maybe that I’m too lazy, maybe too tired. Instead I try to listen in my sleep to whether I can hear her.

  I hear nothing but feel something is wrong. So many nights this happens that sometimes I want
to get bedrails and cage her in so she can’t get out. Now, although her room is only a few feet across the corridor, and both our doors stand ajar so I can hear the least sound, still and all I cannot summon myself from the depths of sleep. I want to wake but can’t move. Instead of getting to the surface I’m going deeper. At last I shout, Helen! Helen!

  What!

  Helen!

  Yes.

  Go and see is she all right.

  Helen goes out and runs back shouting Granny is on the floor! Dermot! Granny is on the floor!

  Inside her bedroom door my mother is stretched out on her stomach. Her glasses are pressed into the carpet. She’s shaking her legs like a stranded fish. Like a fish landed into a boat. We lift her together. She comes up straight as a plank and can’t stand. The legs go backward and drag behind her. She tries to smile.

  Mother, are you all right?

  They moved something on me, she replies.

  Yes, I say.

  It was not where it should have been.

  I know that.

  She has done her lips. Has on a blouse. She shakes uncontrollably.

  Mother, why do you get out of bed? Why?!

  I can’t hold her, says Helen.

  We find it difficult to bend her legs. We seat her on the bed.

  I’m eighty years of age, she cries in despair.

  Would she like a cup of tea? asks Helen.

  Yes, Mother says smiling.

  *

  She sits in the kitchen in her slip and red blouse, green pus on her bandaged head where the wound has become infected, and her chin is shaking like a piston. She drinks the tea gratefully and calls for bread. Then, when we don’t bring the bread immediately, she calls for something sweet. So we give her a slice of swiss roll.

  The three of us sit at the table. She constantly adjusts her glasses. In the fall one of the arms was bent. It’s six in the morning. The central heating is purring in the background. A deep white October frost covers everything.

  Is today Sunday?

  No.

  Are you sure?

  Yes.

  When it’s Sunday you’ll have my outfit ready, she asks Helen.

  I will.

  We lead her into the kitchen, she undoes the back door, peers out, then we stop a moment at the draining board, she stands before all the items she once knew intimately, then on we go to the living room, I lead her to her armchair, then along the corridor, she pauses by Maisie’s door and incongruously laughs and puts a finger to her lips.

  Shsh! she says. Maisie’s sleeping.

  We enter her room. She puts her hand on the cursed radiator to check for heat. We undress her.

  Glasses, she says.

  She touches her glasses. I put them away.

  She touches her ears.

  I take her earrings. Then cup one hand under her backside and another under her back and lift her into bed while Helen holds her hands.

  Don’t rough it, she says.

  After we put her beneath the sheets, I watch her from the foot of the bed, lean down and kiss her.

  There’s one thing, she says. I am afraid those are not my glasses.

  As I lie in the dark I keep hearing her falling. But each time I look into the room she’s sleeping, as Helen says, like a bird.

  *

  Within a week the hints of Parkinson’s disease have crept from her chin, down her hands, along her thighs. Our trips to the bathroom are frenzied affairs.

  What was once a tic you pretended not to see has become a spasm, a physical morse code that’s tapping out some painful message from a ravaged interior.

  But for the rosary beads, her earrings and glasses she would have little. Lipstick and nail varnish are her only decorations. But she has an attachment to certain bright colours on a Sunday. Once she was a very vain lady, now she’ll turn aside at dinner and spit out meat she cannot chew onto the carpet.

  And she, says Eileen, who does a few hours in the house every day, that was a great woman to look after herself.

  What was once impatience is now an obsession. She fills her mouth at table in such a manner that her small gorge cannot accommodate it, then up it comes, and she’s on her feet to the door. Except for dessert.

  Dessert, she calls. Dessert!

  Dessert is fruit biscuits crumbled into tinned mandarins. She spoons it into her mouth without stopping, takes off her bib and pushes against the table while Maisie runs through the stations on the radio. The disco has started. After spinning the dial Maisie finds heavy rock, then music from the Sixties, including Clarence Frogman Henry, and finally rap.

  If there’s one thing I hate, explained Maisie, it’s silence.

  I open the dining-room door.

  Wait for me, says Mother. I’d wait for you.

  She’s up and on her feet. I lead her to her armchair. She dips into the metal cup at her side and lifts out her rosary. She dips again, lifts out a small prayer sheet to Padre Pio and scrutinizes it. Replaces it in the cup and prays.

  The head is tipped back, and the whispers are low to begin with, then after a while the sibilants grow in intensity, she barks out the name of God, and stops suddenly, her rounded back straightens, then drawing the rosary into the air, she finds her place and begins again.

  *

  What’s coming now? laughs Mother as I advance with the pills across the sitting room.

  She picks them out of my hand with her painted fingernails and places them on her palm, then picks them again, one by one, and drops them under her tongue. She sips the milk, and throwing her head back opens her mouth like a minnow in a stream, and shakes her cheeks and gargles.

  She gets two down.

  I hand her another.

  That’s enough, she says.

  No, two more.

  Why do you want to do this to me?! And she nips me.

  It’s good for you.

  With eyes narrowed in frustration she takes the second lot of pills. The red aspro stains her tongue. She swills the milk around. Goes through all the same motions again, closes her eyes and swallows. Then gags on the final pill. Her eyes water.

  God in Heaven, she says.

  Oh, she was always like that, says Maisie, ever since she was a child.

  The mother glares at Maisie.

  What would you know? she says.

  Ha-ha, says Maisie.

  Now, Winnie says.

  We head to the toilet. I steady her over the bowl. Afterwards I make her clean herself. Then I turn on the taps for her to wash her hands. Instead she reaches for her false teeth.

  No, not the teeth, I say, not yet.

  Dear God, she says.

  First wash your hands.

  The teeth, the teeth, she says.

  I take her hands away from her mouth. She fights me. I slap her hands.

  I am over eighty years of age, she cries, and you are abusing me.

  I stand ashamed beside her as she washes her hands, dries them and then we do the teeth together. She gags again as I replace the plate. The teeth push through her cheek like ribs. She plops them into place. All her former intimacies, the habits she’d learnt when alone, are following a different pattern than before.

  Before the teeth, wash the hands, I say.

  That’s right, she says.

  We go back across the carpeted floors, looking into the other rooms as we go, like two people in a fairground. Arriving by her armchair again she reaches for her beads, and with one hand dropped over the other, and the knees delicately crossed, she closes her eyes.

  She reaches a hand to correct her glasses. These are not my glasses, she says, then the beads inch through her fingers.

  *

  I said to Eileen that at night I’d hear a thud and rush into Winnie’s room to find her safely asleep and then realize that the sound I’d heard was Maisie in her room slapping the seat down on the wooden commode. So Eileen took the seat away to stop the sudden commotion at night, but now there was nothing to cover the unseemly contents o
f the po.

  The following morning Maisie entered the dining room like the Maisie of old. As I sat next door with Mother I could hear the tirade begin.

  I demand the return, she said, slapping the table when Eileen brought her dinner, of the seat of the commode.

  You were waking Dermot with it at night.

  Tell him I want to talk to him, she said slapping the table louder. How dare he!

  It was not him that took it, said Eileen, it was me.

  I want it back where it was.

  Yes, Maisie.

  We cannot live without the seat of the commode. I want it back, no matter who took it.

  All right, said Eileen.

  We want it back immediately.

  Yes, Maisie.

  It’s disgraceful, she said and she switched on the radio, that we have to look at our own piss.

  The seat of the commode went back. Down it banged in the middle of the night with, I thought, an added intensity from then on.

  *

  My mother snores with her head back and her mouth open. The glasses have slipped. She wakes.

  Are the potatoes boiling?

  Yes.

  Did you feed Maisie?

  I did.

  What day is it?

  To prove that today is not Sunday I show her the date and day on the front of the Irish Press that is delivered along with the milk.

  Did you pay the man?

  I did.

  Did the bins go out?

  Bennie took them.

  And how are things in Sligo?

  Fine.

  Will you bring me there some day?

  I will.

  You’ll bring me to your place by the sea?

  I will.

  To see the chainies, you bugger you, she says. Chainies is her pet word for china. She’d once visited me in Sligo and saw us washing the delft under the outside tap and was horrified. She skips through her beads. I fill a glass of wine.

  Supping, she says.

  That’s right, I agree.

  Always supping.

  A bit.

  Your father never drank, she says and nips me.

  Yes, he did.

  No, he didn’t. It’s you are the guilty party.

  Mother, he did.

  Never. Never. Never. Nor did he smoke.

  He died of smoking.